Earl Norman

The Earl Norman books are becoming extremely rare, and publishers don’t seem to be interested in reprinting the series. The only way some of us may ever have all the stories is for collectors to scan and type the stories into PDF to swap with other collectors. I have already completed PDFs of HANG ME IN HONG KONG and KILL ME IN ROPPONGI. I am working on KILL ME IN YOKOSUKA. If other collectors would do the same for some of the other books, we could eventually have PDFs of all ten books. Why not help? I can be contacted at fadingshadows40@gmail.com

Sunday, January 19, 2014

House In Shanghai

House In Shanghai by
Emily Hahn (Originally published as Miss Jill in 1947, and released in an AVON
paperback edition in 1950 as Miss Jill From Shanghai; then again in Fawcett
Crest edition in 1958 as House In Shanghai. Jill is a sweet young prostitute working
in a Shanghai red light district. Her story is interesting; though she’s
British but comes from Australia. Her mother appears to be living in Australia
with different men, and often places the young Jill in the convent. At about 15,
and highly intelligent, she meets a rich
Japanese man, and wanting to learn languages becomes acquainted with him she is
soon his paramour. He takes her around the world with him, his wife and
daughters, and pretends she is merely a friend of the daughter. In Japan they
are forced apart, and she is put on a boat to Shanghai where she meets a count,
who is a rounder and takes her money. She ends up with the house of
prostitution. She is a white girl with soft blond hair. It might be noted, too,
that girls from around the world were being forced into brothels from white
slavery markets at the time, so she wasn’t the only white girl in this
situation in Shanghai. Jill makes the best of her life, as she struggles as a
prostitute. When Japan makes a bid for world conquest, she is placed in a POW
camp in Hong Kong with other British subjects, where she reforms with the help
of a priest, and upon liberation sets out on a new path. This is likely the influence for such novels as The World of Susie Wong, A Girl Named Tamiko, and others.

Emily Hahn was a
newspaper writer, Harvey Girl, spent time in Africa and China, and lived in the
red light district of China (her bio doesn't say she worked in the red light
district, however). She lived with several Chinese writers and poets; she
eventually married an Englishman, was an Opium addict, and wrote numerous
novels during her long career. I'm surprised there has never been a movie chronicling
her life. She was an American, though of Asian descent, and graduated with an
engineering degree. This was in the early 1900s. She broke many barriers as a
woman, an Asian in America, and something of a rebel. She was in China when
Japan invaded, and slapped her Japanese interrogator. Whew! Plus, she was very
beautiful.